the Book of the Dead ( PDF )

The Doctrine Of Eternal Life.
Tmu-Ra, i.e., he existed before Osiris and the other gods of his company. These two passages prove the
identity of the belief in eternal life in the XVIIIth dynasty with that in the Vth and VIth dynasties.
But while we have this evidence of the Egyptian belief in eternal life, we are nowhere told that man's
corruptible body will rise again; indeed, the following extracts show that the idea prevailed that the body
lay in the earth while the soul or spirit lived in heaven.
1. ba ar pet sat ar ta
Soul to heaven, body to earth.[4] (Vth dynasty.)
[1. Recueil de Travaux, t. v., p. 170 (Pepi, 1. 85).
2. ###. Plate XIX., l. 16 (Book of the Dead, Chapter CLXXV.).
3. Plate XXVIII., 1. 15.
4 Recueil de Travaux, t. iv., p. 71 (l. 582).]
{p. lvii}
2. mu-k er pet xa-k er ta
Thy essence is in heaven, thy body to earth.[1] (VIth dynasty.)
3. pet xer ba-k ta xeri tut-k
Heaven hath thy soul, earth hath thy body.[2] (Ptolemaic period.)
Constancy in the belief in the resurrection.
There is, however, no doubt that from first to last the Egyptians firmly believed that besides the soul
there was some other element of the man that would rise again. The preservation of the corruptible body
too was in some way connected with the life in the world to come, and its preservation was necessary to
ensure eternal life; otherwise the prayers recited to this end would have been futile, and the time
honoured custom of mummifying the dead would have had no meaning. The never ending existence of
the soul is asserted in a passage quoted above without reference to Osiris; but the frequent mention of the
uniting of his bones, and of the gathering together of his members,[3] and the doing away with all
corruption from his body, seems to show that the pious Egyptian connected these things with the
resurrection of his own body in some form, and he argued that what had been done for him who was
proclaimed to be giver and source of life must be necessary for mortal man.
The khat or physical body.
The physical body of man considered as a whole was called khat, a word which seems to be connected
with the idea of something which is liable to decay. The word is also applied to the mummified body in
the tomb, as we know from the words "My body (khat) is buried."[4] Such a body was attributed to the
god Osiris;" in the CLXIInd Chapter of the Book of the Dead "his great
[1. Recueil de Travaux, t. v., p. 43 (l. 304).
2. Horrack, Lamentations d'Isis et de Nephthys, Paris, 1866, p. 6.
3. Already in the pyramid texts we have "Rise up, O thou Teta! Thou hast received thy head, thou hast knitted together thy
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